The Big Picture - ‘Reservoir Dogs’ at 30 and the Legacy of Sundance ’92

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

We're hopping in a time machine back to 1992. Why? It’s been 30 years since Quentin Tarantino’s debut film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival along with other movies from a memorable class of other filmmakers. Adam Nayman joins Sean to discuss 'Dogs' and what it means now and how some of those other films were remembered, or not. Hosts: Sean Fennessey Guest: Adam Nayman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twice a week, Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay dissect the biggest topics in Black culture, politics, and sports on their show, Higher Learning. They discuss the most important and timely conversations while also frequently inviting guests on the podcast and occasionally debating each other. Check out Higher Learning on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about getting stuck in the middle with you, Adam Naiman. On today's episode, we are hopping in a time machine back to 1992. Why are we doing that? Well, it's been 30 years since Quentin Tarantino's debut film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, along with a memorable class of other filmmakers making debuts of their own. Adam is here to discuss dogs and what it means now and some other films

that were remembered or not. And you know, the Sundance Film Festival is happening right now and it has a slightly different reputation than it did way back when. So let's go back 30 years ago, Adam. Reservoir Dogs. You weren't there. You weren't in Park City that day when the film premiered, but I'm sure the film

made an impact on you. I was in Morris Cody Elementary School in Toronto, Sean. I was 11 years old. I too was 10 years old. And we're just a couple of late 30s, early 40s somethings talking about a Quentin Tarantino movie on a podcast. And yet it does feel like one of those movies that if I were to dig back into the deep recesses of my mind that and maybe it's the same for you you didn't hear about it the way you heard about the normal movies right you know what I'm saying when I when I say that it wasn't like I was seeing a movie with my

dad and there was a trailer for Reservoir Dogs it was probably something that was either like a VHS preview or something in the back one of the many general interest magazines my family subscribed to or probably entertainment weekly which my family subscribed which i started reading like a little you know fake movie biz person when i was a kid which is really cute but it felt like something simultaneously that was coming, but had also been. And it was a big deal that this thing had been and that a certain enclave of influential people had seen it. And now it was coming and all the boring people in your life, like your parents, don't want you to watch it. And all the cool people in your life are like, yeah, watch it.

It's like a devil on your shoulder. I have better recall of Pulp Fiction being that way just because I literally was a teenager at that point. But I remember Reservoir Dogs from before I saw it. Yeah, I had the same experience. The difference, I guess, for me is I did not get a chance to see it until after I saw Pulp Fiction. And so I saw this movie a few years after the fact. And I think I actually got, and perhaps this explains a bit about my predilection for hype culture around filmmakers and around movies. But I got excited about the idea of a Quentin Tarantino movie just from watching quick time videos of the Reservoir Dogs trailer over and over again on my early,

early Windows pre-95 computer. And I don't know what it was that ensnared me, that got me excited about this movie. Maybe it's a little bit about what you're talking about, but I'm not even sure at the age of 10 or 11 if I had cool people in my life to tell me that this was a cool movie. How were you even made aware of its existence, just aside from Entertainment Weekly?

Did you have friends who were interested in this world? Did you have older friends who knew about movies like this? I had friends with older siblings who were somewhat curatorial. I definitely remember them bullying with early 90s music and sort of being like, get rid of that tape of Aerosmith's Get a Grip. That's not good music. You know what's good music? We don't talk about that but i remember you know older older older siblings kind of doing that and there was and i mean again it was it was kind of like schoolyard stuff or or hallway so i was like you

know someone's dad saw something or or or or whatever and i know that the poster for reservoir dogs in the pages of the globe and mail because you, newspapers used to have movie ads all the time. And that's how you learned about a lot of stuff was just opening up that section. You know, that poster was there before the movie opened. And it was pretty seductive. I mean, we'll probably end up talking about that poster and how it's kind of shorthand for a whole bunch of aspects of fan culture that are also kind of easy to make fun of like dorm room poster kind of movie but before you can be on the back end of that and taking that apart and all the terrible things that it means you got to speak to how appealing that is to someone who just wants

a dorm room or you know a room that actually you know like you know their mom's not going to come bug them and stuff there was something something about Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction that felt profoundly teenage to someone who was either not quite or about to become teenage. And I don't know if this was the same for you with Tarantino, too, but it was a deeply imitative kind of awareness where it was kind of like, I see this thing and also I kind of want to do that. And I don't know what that is. Maybe wear a suit or something but it it was a it was a it was it was a vibe and it's embarrassing to talk about now but it was the opposite of embarrassing when i was 11 or 12 in fact when i was 11 or 12 it was maybe the one unembarrassing thing was that the poster for reservoir dogs looked cool and i'm sure if i could find some

way to watch this movie, it would be cool. And then I would, by the transitory principle, be cool. Yeah. One of the ways that the movie went into the culture was not just because there was this exciting script and this exciting young filmmaker, but because the movie did actually premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. But the road to the festival, I think, is kind of fascinating. You know, Tarantino's kind of rise, so to speak, has been chronicled many times Festival. But the road to the festival, I think is kind of fascinating. Tarantino's kind of rise, so to speak, has been chronicled many times over. But the idea of a movie like this emerging at that time is unique. The way that the film was funded, which is to say that Tarantino

had been hustling scripts, Natural Born Killers and True Romance in particular across Hollywood for a couple of years in the late 80s and early 90s, been trying to catch some work as an actor. He'd been trained as an actor and he wasn't really having a ton of success doing so. When he stumbles across Monty Hellman, the great filmmaker who he really loved, and a guy named Richard Gladstein, who ran a company called Live Entertainment. And somehow he got through Lawrence Bender, a producer friend of his, who eventually became his producing partner, got the script into Harvey Keitel's hands. And all of these people together sort of fix this little tiny shoot-em-up movie,

this heist movie, this complex script that is also very, very simple. And by the summer of 91, the movie's being shot in Highland Park here in Los Angeles. And it's a movie like no other, and yet it is a movie that we saw so many times in the 1990s. And I find it a little bit hard to kind of untangle what you were describing, which is this sense of anticipation that we got around the movie, this sense of cool that people got. It's almost like organized their personalities around both before and after it came out and now sort of what the movie means so let's try to unpack a little bit about that what place in the culture does reservoir dogs have for you now and how does that relate to

the way that you saw it when you were 11 12 years old well one of the pieces that i was you know that i that i wrote for the ringer a couple years years ago, and again, I don't want to drag too much towards Pulp Fiction, but that idea that whatever battles Tarantino might have lost in the early 90s, like he did've got their Blu-ray of In the Soup, you know. You know, Pulp Fiction didn't win the Oscars, but no filmmaker won the cultural war like Tarantino did coming out of the 90s. He was a winner at the time. He was kind of became a front runner at the time, but he has won the cultural war to some extent. And there's an awful lot of American pop culture, not just movies, but, you know, TV and the things in between TV and cinema and things adjacent to TV and cinema, it is made in his image to an extent, you know? And I think that that idea of him being a kind of a guy who pushed some idea of being a rebel or a

usurper or someone oppositional is now so interesting to see now that he really is a front runner and like the only person who can get a non-marvel movie made at a certain budget level that's going to be profitable that's the legacy you know the the the legacy is you know he came out of nowhere to end up being everywhere and like truly everywhere with you know like fingers or tentacles and so many different aspects of film culture and that's kind of hard to disentangle from certain genuinely modest aspects of Reservoir Dogs not modest in terms of dialogue or personality but modest in terms of production value to the point that let's put it this way when we get later in this episode and talk about the unveiling of Sundance 92 it's not like this stood apart and was like oh this is

the big thing it wasn't it was just a movie that happened to be there the audience made it into a big thing because of how they reacted to how tarantino cinema worked on first blush i don't think any of us can honestly watch new tarantino movies any more fresh what does that even mean it's like looking at the color blue for the first time like we just know what this is now and then we have mixed opinions on greater or lesser diminishing returns and how tired or how inventive you know his act has gotten over time these the fun thought experiments reservoir dogs and you have had to go to the archives and read the reviews and stuff is how did people react to this for a first time and that was even stratified by age too. Because for the film

critics who'd seen a Ringo Lamb movie before, or who'd seen The Killing, they weren't talking about originality, they were talking about derivativeness. Then for a lot of other people, this is the dangerous thing about Tarantino and the irresistible thing about him. They're seeing the whole of film history being spit out in a way that to them feels original, like this is their first encounter or engagement with it. And so of course it feels amazing. Imagine sitting down and watching something that's got Ringo Lamb and Stanley Kubrick in it, and then imagine you don't know what those things are. Just to say, imagine being 13. Yeah, I would say that that is probably one of the things that I admire most about the movie is the fact that there is a derivative quality to it and that Tarantino historically does not deny the fact that premiered at Sundance in 1992. And like a lot of independent movies, because this is really the last time that Quentin Tarantino had limitations,

you know, budgetary limitations, style limitations, casting limitations. Pretty much from here on out, he's able to cast people like Bruce Willis. Pretty much from here on out, he's able to raise his budgets to 20 30 40 million dollars on each project and so this is an interesting experiment you know it feels much more like a you know like a ship in a bottle kind of a movie where you really have to do everything just so to make it work in the way that it does and it's a lot of different kinds of movies at once and I wonder like I think there was something erroneous about the way that he was classified in those early days as a quote unquote original voice. And maybe some of that is because of the pop culture laden dialogue.

Maybe some of that is because of the sense that there was this invention with the way that he was cutting and carving time and moving pieces around in his movies. When in fact, I think energy is really the thing that i am feeling from his movies when i watch them and i re-watched reservoir dogs last night and i was like this is not only propulsive it is alive it is throbbing as a movie and that is actually a lot harder to do than city on fire homage or the perfect needle drop there's something that pulsating in his movies that I'm still having a hard time kind of locating how he does it,

but he does it. Well, he does it like someone who's a very adept viewer, right? And there's an extent to which now he's reinvented himself weirdly as, not weirdly, I mean, he's reinvented himself credibly, I should say,

as sometimes a critic and sometimes a historian and a kind of keeper of the 35 millimeter flame. You know, this is a guy who spent his life watching movies, maybe to the, you know, to the extent that he didn't develop normal social skills or a normal sense of the world outside movies, which is where the historical turn of his later movies becomes interesting, where suddenly it's not enough to just do film history. It's more to sort of, you know use cinema to to engage with history but i think that if he didn't exist you know history would have had to invent him he's one of those filmmakers because you're dealing at a point in the 90s where the scale of american movies has gotten so grotesque

and even people who enjoy blockbuster spectacle are like how many sequels and reiterations can we kind of take and we're independent cinema and we'll talk about this more later i'm sure but in that spike mike slackers dykes mode of a kind of oppositional implicitly maybe political implicitly kind of diverse mode you know is there but it doesn't occupy or really appeal with a couple of exceptions to a kind of, you know, young, disposable income kind of audience. So Tarantino kind of becomes a bridge in that gap. Politically, ideologically, the things that he's pushing towards or against, he actually doesn't fit

with the other Sundance filmmakers that year. You look at that doc that's on Criterion about Sundance 92, and it's about representational politics. And the festival from on down read for sort of being like space for different stories, space for different stories, which whether it's earnest or boilerplate, of, of, of like a virgin and has all kinds of, you know, repulsive language only doesn't really skirt the racial stuff. Cause it happens to be an all white movie, which is going to get, he's going to get more into trouble later with,

with, with pulp fiction. You know, it's got all kinds of sections that's in it and masochistic violence. I mean, it doesn't fit the progressive agenda is what I'm saying in that sense. I've seen it described as a movie that looks like the 50s set in the 90s,

but acts like the 70s. And that's not really something that you can say about pretty much any other film released independently in that year and in this class. Even in refusing to be, let's say, either as innocuous or as craven as Hollywood product, it's not behaving subversively like independent product. I mean, there's that great line that David Foster Wallace had that in Blue Velvet, whatever else you think of that movie, David

Lynch is interested in a human ear and in Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino just wants to show the ear be cut off, right? And it's not quite the Coen brothers who from the very beginning are clearly trying to investigate Deep Egg's essential stuff. Maybe Tarantino was too, but that's not where the excitement in Reservoir Dogs was. The excitement was the cruelty and the sadism and the energy and the cool. Cool is a really hard thing to quantify because cool goes out of style kind of just like that. And that's why I think you're right. The decade mixing is what's really significant about that movie.

Not just the energy, but that sense of timelessness, but not vague timelessness, a specific kind of timelessness. It's not that it doesn't belong to any one time. It belongs to multiple times simultaneously. And so it activates something in older viewers and especially, I think, in younger viewers as well. The other movies, Sundance that year, it's a really interesting lineup, which we'll get into, even put together,

they don't equal that kind of opportunism and accessibility that Tarantino somehow cultivated because the impact of this movie is seismic. I'm still struck by the limitations though. When I go back and look at it, I don't think I quite realized how small this movie is. The fact that it is primarily set in one place. And as I've been watching the new Sundance films this year in virtual Sundance and trying to locate all of the COVID

productions and many of these films are COVID productions Reservoir Dogs could have been a COVID production it's a very small cast there's only three to four locations everything is very cloistered the storytelling is almost claustrophobic and you can I think the fact that he is able to transcend that specifically and make it feel as if you have been sunk into a world is really the thing that recommends it the most. There is a milieu that he is creating in this movie that is a little bit different, I would say, from the ones that he makes after this. And I'm not sure what that is. Is it the film stock? Is it the fact that he's working with a DP that he didn't work with as much in the future?

Is it the way that the script is written? Is it the way that it is stylized in particular? Some of the craftspeople that worked on it early on. I can't quite figure it out, but it actually, even though Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are kissing cousins in some way, this movie feels a little bit different. Do you know what I'm saying when I say that? It's because in Pulp Fiction, there's nothing that it doesn't ultimately show you. It may show it to you out of order. It may show it to you from an unexpected angle. You may not expect to run into character A from the point of view of character B.

I mean, Reservoir Dogs is all about absence. It's the planning of a heist you never see, whose aftermath is already kind of vague and only half understood because it limits point of view. And when it does flash back and when it does you know jigger with with the you know with chronology it's not necessarily filling things in it's kind of just reiterating stuff you've already seen from a slightly different point of view i mean blank blanks get filled in but they don't get filled in with production value you know and in that sense he does not only create a world but he creates a world where the off-screen action feels relatively credible you don't watch the movie doubting you don't watch the movie skeptically going well there's no heist

because they couldn't afford it you know you don't watch you don't watch the movie thinking there's no heist because you know he made this and not michael mann or something it's just a really strong storytelling decision but that which isn't shown or that which isn't seen still feels like it belongs to that world. And I think another reason why it creates its own universe is because he's not struggling to live up to some Quentin Tarantino universe. And some really half-cocked and to me, ongoingly only semi-successful idea to be like, this is all in the same place. And they all smoke the same brand of cigarettes and people are brothers. I mean, he plays with this shit all the time and kind of means it and kind of doesn't i think it's interesting that he didn't he doesn't have a legacy to live up to with this movie he's just kind of putting himself

out there and modest is an interesting word because you used it it is in some ways a modest because of its limitations but the personality is so deeply immodest it's the sound of someone who likes to hear himself talk no wonder people like us gravitated towards it i don't know what you mean by that adam but the but the the sound of what someone likes to hear himself talking who's going to make you listen to him talk and i i don't know if you would agree with this or disagree with this because you watched it last night and i haven't watched it for about i don't know a year or so i think what's interesting about this film is not what people would often say about dialogue that's good they don't all speak in

a distinctive way they all kind of talk the same and that was really in vogue around this time but like david mammet you know this is where mammet starts having his fingerprints over a lot of american tv and theater and film. They have like, they talk in a particular idiom, they talk in a particular argo or dialogue. You don't have clashing dialogue types in this movie. They're the same. It's really the sound of one voice for 90 minutes. And it's fascinating. I think you can see that actually more in television now. I think if you see a show like Succession, where every character has a kind of verbal dexterity and a kind of flashpan scene in particular feels like the scene that works the least well in the movie now.

And maybe that part of that is because it has gone through the cultural meat grinder and we've talked about it quite a bit. But I think that that feels like a scene in which he is legitimately trying to ape David Mamet, whereas some of the other scenes

feel slightly more born out of his own, I don't want to say invention necessarily but his own like photosynthesis of culture you know he's always kind of transmogrifying his idea of culture into the movie well they're mitigated by the fact that he's not actually delivering the dialogue you know i mean when we're talking about reservoir dogs we're also talking about to go far enough back where it's like the scene in sleep with me where he talks about Top Gun, right? Or the bit in Crimson Tide, which is now a little later, but he script doctored

where we have just the pop cultural riffing and the dialogue with Crimson Tide, which never fit. The Silver Surfer. The Silver Surfer thing, which never fit in that movie. But at the time, people were like, well, that's good because Tarantino,

it's a big Hollywood blockbuster, but here's some cool pop culture riffage. Again, I think in in 1992 it would have been pretty must have been just incredibly fresh right and having it straight from the source like that also casts him into a particular tradition of the writer director star that even though that's not really been who he is since then i mean it's more like cameos you know premiering at a festival like sundance which is you know filled with homages to people like Cassavetes or an idea of American independent cinema that's maybe closer to a Woody Allen or a Spike Lee in terms of the do-it-all

multi-hyphenate. That opening scene's really significant. This is a film by Quentin Tarantino, and here he is, and he's introducing you to himself and to his world. I went back and, you know, reread Roger Ebert's early review of that film, and he's, you know himself and and to his world i went back and you know reread roger ebert's early review of that film and he's you know saying oh this is an actor who could end up playing great great crazy villains and other people's movies he's like interested in tarantino as a character and a kind of on-screen on-screen presence so that you know that that that strategy is very purposeful i see a lot of different kinds of movies in this movie you know i that strategy is very purposeful. I see a lot of different kinds of movies in this movie. You know, I see it's very much a chamber piece.

It's a movie that's about performance because we've got Mr. Orange as this kind of double agent and all these characters have these sort of nicknames. There's almost like a superhero getting the gang together quality to it. You know, it's also, tell me if you can go along with me on this, but it feels like in my memory the first

internet movie you know i mentioned that trailer and trying to download that trailer on incredibly slow you know incredibly slow internet feed at the time the soundtrack and trying to acquire the soundtrack and hear songs there's no youtube at this time you know you can't there's no spotify you can't just find any song you want. When I saw this movie for the first time, I was like, what are these songs and where can I get them? Because they were not pop songs. These were not 70 songs that my parents listened to. This wasn't the Eagles or Diana Ross. These were obscure bubblegum songs that had kind of gone out of fashion and out of rotation. You mentioned that sort of interconnected world aspect too,

where if you've seen Pulp Fiction before this movie, as I had, and I knew about Vincent Vega, and then we're introduced to a character named Vic Vega, and then it's becoming clear that these are characters, and this is also not unlike the comic books that I like to read, and there's this idea of this ever-expanding universe that never actually fits together, but we know that there are satellites speaking to each other from across the galaxy of this guy's movies. It felt like a movie that was born to be message boarded. And I guess I'm trying to figure out,

I'm sure there are other examples of this at the time. I'm thinking because we're around the same age as has been made painfully clear a couple of times already today. So I'm thinking 1992 for instance so i'm no more pop culturally aware or mature when i saw terminator 2 really than when i saw those were dogs and i saw terminator 2 because my mom made them let me into the movie theater because she's awesome and likes the terminator mom she's the best but uh terminator 2 is not an internet movie

and i don't just mean subjectively for me That I had books on the making of it That I used to read and read and read How they did the effects In a way, there's no depths to plumb Or mysteries to unravel Because it's all very present in the culture Even the soundtrack is like Guns and Roses

With Reservoir Dogs There's a certain cultivated obscurity to it Where it's not a sequel to The Terminator But there's a Hong Kong movie that it's kind of based on, or, you know, like I had seen the taking of Pelham one, two,

three, by the time I was 12, because again, my mom rules. And so the idea of a character's named Mr. Pink or whatever, I kind of knew that. So in the sense that there's pieces to put together,

not in that kind of, you know, David Lynch way of what, you know, how do you add this movie up or the donnie darko thing of you know what happens in this movie but the sense that there's these kind of elements requiring a certain amount of research and the primary materials might not be right at hand for everybody so yeah you go click on whatever that does feel a little bit it does feel a little bit

internetty um and yet it's funny too now again this is just a function of different colliding nostalgias it also because it's a radio and whatever it feels like it's such a it's such an analog memory movie for me like i had friends in junior high school and this was more pulp fiction than reservoir dogs but it was both who for you know they were asked to do original projects they would like create a fake movie soundtrack with fake radio DJ bits in between, which I'm sure if I were to listen to them now would be so bad that I would actually just die listening to them. I would just hemorrhage and die if I listened to them now. between imitative filmmaker, the kind of cool that he was putting out there really inspired a bunch of imitation. I'll say one more thing too, because criticism was not as democratized and as widespread as it is now.

The discourse around that movie was almost fully triumphal and affirmative, even though there's a lot you can say about it, that people should have had problems with the same way they have problems with his movies now, where now the discourse around tarantino is almost entirely just what kind of shots can you take at these movies and not wrongly so but i think that for those of us who were maybe aware of things like consensus and acclaim or who even just in the most cursory way would look at like graphs of what critics thought of a movie or star ratings or

something that was the other thing about it that felt so seismic it's like oh god everybody seems to like this how can this outlawed dangerous seeming thing also be such a kind of intellectual lightning rod and rallying point because tarantino was made by critics before he was made by audiences and that's where the film festival heritage of reservoir dogs is very significant because people fawned over it. You're right. But there was also a significant amount of controversy attached to the movie that we didn't use the word problematic back then. But the ear-cutting scene that you referenced, which I think is a little bit of a Trojan horse for the telling of the story of the movie and probably greatly helped the movie.

And it probably is a very specific provocation on Tarantino's part to include that scene in the way that he did. But people took issue with that. And I would not say it was warmly embraced. I would say whether it was necessarily critics who were criticizing that sequence, it was deemed unsafe, I would say. And walkouts were well known for the film. Some film, Wes Craven famously walked out of the movie and didn't enjoy it. So it wasn't without controversy. I guess the idea of whether or not something being acclaimed is noisy enough to drown out

those concerns. It felt like it was easier for that to happen now. Yeah, I mean, but it was also that the critics at the time who cast their lot with it were sort of casting their lot with aesthetics and style and, you know, morality is so boring and they're reaching back past the 80s back to the 70s where they would sort of say, you know, people said that about Peckinpah or people said that about sforzese or or de palma it's almost like it's almost like reservoir dogs is maybe a way to put it's like where the 80s never happened you know the the the not just 80s music and 80s culture but like just that kind of smoothening out and and making boring of american mainstream film in the 80s didn't happen or reservoir Reservoir Dogs just kind of ignored it.

And Tarantino is famous for saying that the 80s was the worst decade for American movies, full stop. That the 50s and the 80s are terribly boring. There's a couple of other things about the movie that I think are really fascinating. One in particular is just, like I said, that this is really how I became aware of what Sundance was. And it sort of tricked me into thinking that Sundance was full of cool movies. And cool is really not the right word, I think, for this festival. So Tarantino, one, he studied, and I guess sort of trained slash performed at the Sundance Institute. So he took this script and, you know,

blocked some of the scenes with Steve Buscemi. Folks like Terry Gilliam and Volker Schlondorf sort of observed what he was doing with this movie, which is something that, you know, Sundance has this incredible heritage of working with young filmmakers and crafting, helping them craft their careers. And, you know, Tarantino, like so many before him

and after him, got to do this. And they basically encouraged him to kind of retain his vision, that he had these unusual ideas, I think, for how to stage some of these scenes for a movie that could have looked like a play. And David Mamet is sometimes accused of this as well, a lot of men talking in rooms kind of movies. And I think he found a way to bring a vivacity to it in part with that. This movie was also a pretty big hit. It was a modest arthouse hit in the US, but it's a huge hit in Europe.

And this is the other thing that made him so famous is Festival Darling in the United States goes abroad and takes his film to other festivals around the world. And also, of course, is celebrated by the English press and celebrated by the French press and becomes very much like some of those 70s auteurs, a European star, someone who is obsessed over in a very specific way. It feels like that would have been impossible without the Sundance launchpad as well, which I find kind of interesting. Is that

still something that is happening now? Do you see that like European filmmakers becoming obsessed with American filmmakers in the 2010s and 20s? No, I mean, I think that there's little echoes of it either because some of the American filmmakers who the Europeans are obsessed with American filmmakers in the 2010s and 20s? No, I mean, I think that there's little echoes of it either, because some of the American filmmakers who the Europeans are obsessed with are still around. You know, I mean, it was very symbolic when Clint Eastwood gave Tarantino the Palme d'Or in 94, not just because Cannes had taken Eastwood seriously in the past, but because Eastwood was passing some mantle onto Tarantino, even though they're hugely different artists. and there's way less crossover between them I mean there's

crossover between Eastwood and Spielberg and there's crossover between Spielberg and Tarantino there's very little actual crossover between the two Eastwood and Tarantino if Tarantino was a character in an Eastwood movie Eastwood would punch him you know I mean that's that's the dynamic there but I think that that idea of kind of sacred American monsters and tough, two-fisted American auteurs is always very appealing to the rest of the world. They don't like it so much with American foreign policy, but like with American filmmakers, it's very charming. And so Tarantino was sort of a throwback, I think, in certain people's eyes to an Aldrich or, you know an edgar almer or something at least at the at the at the beginning um but you know now i think it's almost like more like international filmmakers are made in his image where you look at some of the genre filmmakers who've really traveled and

done their form of gentrification for better or worse i mean for better a bong joon-ho or in my mind a ben wheatley for worse i don't want to name filmmakers who've been guests or whatever, but there's filmmakers who I like who do it less, like a Refn, for instance, is a good example of a Tarantino. They're all in his image now. And all of their roads lead towards Hollywood, which is something that would be an interesting thing to get into later here, which is that originally the whole point of Sundance was that these were movies that were pushing against the Hollywood model. And then some of the filmmakers who spearheaded that and did so honestly, like a Spike Lee, eventually the pushing leads them into Hollywood.

Then the question is, how is Sundance going to replenish those ranks? I feel now with the festival, there is no question that 80% of the directors who have a movie there would love to be handed the keys to whatever. I don't know how many of these filmmakers want to be Colin Trevorrow, but the Colin Trevorrow arc is not something that they would ward off with steaks and garlic. You know, there's some that would,

there's some that would, but most wouldn't. Well, I think you can actually point quite specifically to Reservoir Dogs as the turning point when Sundance became the feeder system for Hollywood. I agree. Its intentions were initially quite different. It was essentially, it was not just, I don't think it was just made for artists who were trying to work outside of the realm of Hollywood or against Hollywood's mission. I think it was many filmmakers, and this is still true of a handful of some people who were participating in the festival,

but people who just couldn't get into Hollywood, who even if they tried, they couldn't find their way in. And so they did what they had to do. Tarantino is an example of that. Tarantino is somebody who loves Hollywood, who is fascinated by the movie industry. All you need to do is watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to see that. But he couldn't really get his foot in the door. And so he had to hustle to get this thing off the ground. And when it did hit Sundance, in the program,

the film is described as Jim Thompson meets Samuel Beckett, which I think is maybe a little bit generous in terms of its literary aspiration. But Tim Roth at the time said they were selling tickets for $100 on the bus at the festival to they were selling tickets for a hundred dollars on the bus at the festival to see this movie it was a true blue phenomenon now a hundred dollars in 1992

for a film festival screening is no joke and the fact that it it communicated that cool that we were talking about and it appealed to not just 11 year olds living in toronto or living on long island but the fact that it it struck with 25 year olds and 35. You mean you're not selling your screener link to the Jesse Eisenberg thing for a thousand bucks. I would never sell a screener link that I was offered as a member of the press, Adam.

But that's the thing is like, it wasn't, it was, this wasn't manufactured. I think the interest in this movie was not manufactured. No, no, it wasn't manufactured.

And I think that it's interesting you use the word manufacturing with Sundance because I rewatched, as I'm sure you did, both to prep for this. And I was interested, not just some of the movies in this Criterion collection, this Criterion Channel thing about Sundance 92, which, to be honest, is one of the spurs when we were talking about doing this, right? That little documentary about the history of the festival where you see the old heads from the festival. These are the older established programmers. Even if they no longer work for them.

They're like accomplished alumni. They knew what Sundance was up until 92. They didn't talk about trying to change it, but they sort of talked about how on one hand it was business as usual. And business as usual said with a certain fondness and a little self-satisfaction you know convening panels about the new queer cinema and about black cinema and then you have people on those panels being like why are these panels special when you do panels with white filmmakers you just sort of call it film art you know so there's always that mix a little bit of guilt and a little bit of awkwardness and a little bit of cluelessness that comes any time a white run festival has a progressive a little bit of cluelessness that comes anytime a white run

festival has a progressive mandate the film that is not mentioned in that documentary once except at the beginning is reservoir dogs i kept waiting for them to clear their throats and mention it it's because i think on some level these very respectable and i think praiseworthy programmers who did have sundance with an oppositional mandate and an independent mandate that was like we actually don't want to be a feeder system for anything sure they love that Reservoir Dogs was selling for a hundred dollars a ticket they're proud that they programmed the movie imagine if they hadn't you know can had discovered them or Tiff had discovered them but there was also sort of a sense that this pushed against that the oppositional nature of reservoir dogs is not really rooted in politics or in pushing against authority or hegemony it's rudeness

and that's why it's adolescent fundamentally why i've always thought tarantino's fundamentally an adolescent artist even though he's had certain levels of maturity a lot of the other movies that showed at sundance whether they're with young people or old people, or even something impudent like Greg Araki, who's an interesting contemporary of Tarantino's, that's political to the frigging core, you know? And so is Todd Haynes, and so is Spike Lee, and so sometimes is Soderbergh. And that's what I think Redford was cultivating as always political Hollywood guy. This festival was a little, not just a breeding ground for art and not just a breeding ground for kind of principled kind of commerce, but he was like always wanting, as he said in that documentary, I want to support

these voices from out of nowhere. Turned out Tarantino was one of those voices from out of nowhere, but what he's speaking with that voice and who he's speaking to and what he's saying with it, I don't think is the Sundance norm and has increasingly become the Sundance norm. Yeah. I want to put Sundance in context a little bit at this time, because as you said, there's this great program on the Criterion channel right now. I think maybe two dozen films that premiered at the festival are available on the service. And there's this documentary that you can watch that does everything I think, except basically highlight the Reservoir Dogs phenomenon. And there's probably a few reasons for that. One of which is Reservoir Dogs is not offered in this collection of films,

although many others are. But just to put it in context, this is three years out from Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which I think is probably the first authentic Sundance phenomenon. Would you agree with that? Yeah, totally. And two years out from Roger and Me, another political film from a political filmmaker, overtly political filmmaker, Michael Moore.

And then the year prior to that, we had films like The Grifters and we had John Sayles' City of Hope and Todd Haynes' Poison and Barbara Koppel's American Dreams. You know, Reservoir Dogs has a lot more in common with The Grifters

than it does with those other three films. And there's always been a place I think for really good genre filmmaking at Sundance I think it's the one thing that it probably doesn't get enough credit for frankly because other American festivals have always been just as good at it and so it's not necessarily

you know South by Southwest loves genre films too you know the Toronto Film Festival likes genre films the Telluride likes genre films a lot of know, the Toronto Film Festival likes genre films. The Telluride likes genre films. A lot of these film festivals do that. And so Sundance's identity is as, especially in the last 15 or 20 years, this sort of soft and emotional

kind of coming of age story that plays well to older audiences. But that's not really what the festival was at all in the late 80s and 90s. No, I don't think it was. And I think that Redford, when I say he was the face of it, I mean, I don't mean it disingenuously. I think it's, first of all, it's one of the most beautiful faces. You don't have a more beautiful face than Robert Redford's face. It's like carved in Utah granite. I mean, he beautiful. And he's an emissary of a time when

Hollywood was beautiful, or at least you could sell that idea. And it's the kind of movie star he was. He's the movie star who's in The Candidate. He's the guy who brought down Nixon, you know, he's always in the Watchmen comic book, he's the liberal who runs for president. I mean, I'm sure that maybe not doesn't matter to him. But it was funny to Alan Moore. You know, he's the perfect face for that, because he seems to actually believe in it. But there's just enough glitz and connection there that you know that Sundance isn't going to be all people with their hat in their hands and their pockets turned out making movies. There will be an industry presence, but he's using his celebrity to lift. And then even putting it in Park City is smart because it's the right coast, maybe almost the right time zone, but it's far away from Los Angeles and it's far away from New York, right?

So there's a geographical singularity to it in distance and a novelty to the setting. I mean, we don't want to digress too much into the history of film festivals, but film festivals are an interesting phenomenon to look at. They used to be totally nationalistic. You know, it's about promoting your national cinema. And then based on where they are in the calendar, you set terms for the year or you just show everything that's already shown. That's what Toronto was in the beginning.

It was the festival of festivals. What's everything that's played elsewhere. Sundance being in January is very significant. It says, here you go. Here's the new American stuff that's going to make its way to you, either because it gets distribution here, because other festivals can't help but take it. It's anti-Oscar season in a way. It's not the recency effect.

It's the launch. I also love the idea of it being set in a cold weather environment at the coldest time of the year. It's a dare to Hollywood to say, you're nice and comfortable in Southern California. Come here and be tried, be tested by the boundaries of independent filmmaking. Now, whether it always lives up to that challenge is debatable. But, you know, in 92, there was a piece in the LA Times about the state of Sundance just before it kicked off. And Jeff Gilmore, who was the festival director at the time, said, one of the more difficult things to do with the festival this year is to typify it. And that's a goal. We try very hard not to have 15 very slick melodramas made by white males. So it's intentional for us to show a range of different kinds of independent cinema. It's interesting that 30 years ago, this was still the line of dialogue. This has always been essential to the mission of the festival. And still, many of the biggest hits that have emerged from the festival have been, if not necessarily melodramas, a lot of films made by white males. And that is also a complexity,

a kind of contradiction to the festival and to movies like Reservoir Dogs and Clerks kind of constantly emerging out of this, out of the snow, really. Yeah, and in that sense, you know, are they setting the somewhat static agenda for American popular cinema? Or are they reflecting an agenda that's bigger than Sundance

and bigger than Sundance hype? You know, it's a chicken and egg kind of situation. I mean, this is with no disrespect to the filmmakers who I think maybe on a film by film basis from Sundance I prefer to Tarantino I'm not saying that a Richard Linklater or a or a Spike Lee is a lesser artist but let's be honest Tarantino is the most gigantic influential important filmmaker who's probably primarily associated with this festival right spike lee and michael moore and moore and lee are in the ring right and moore is in a much narrower sphere of visibility because it's documentary and then tarantino is also associated with can because that's where he won his palm door but in a way tarantino being

the the the not the face of sundance but you, its most successful son, I don't think you can blame on Sundance. I think that's just American film culture. And, you know, his movie happened to be there. I don't think, what am I trying to say? I don't think Sundance made Quentin Tarantino what he is. And I don't think that Quentin Tarantino's appeal is tied back to Sundance. The conditions were wonderful and vivid. And I'm sure the people

who paid a hundred bucks to watch it at the Egyptian, it was a kind of life-changing, you know, seeing the Sex Pistols in a small club kind of thing. But I don't attribute Tarantino to Sundance. I think Sundance has more incremental influences across the board in the ways that you're talking about, other kinds of genres and different kinds of writer, director, cinema. In a way, when you mentioned John Sayles and Barbara Koppel, that's kind of what I think of as part of the Sundance image for a good long time, which is good, dutiful, lefty, liberal, political cinema overseen by Robert Redford. That's the vibe. I don't think that, to put a finer point on it, it's not that Tarantino needed Sundance per se,

because it would have been somewhere else that would have scooped this movie and celebrated it. But they may have needed him. I think there is a strong case that if not for him and then a cadre of folks that came in, you know, a handful of years after him, the festival, you know, in 1991, there's this premier magazine story about a handful of years after him the festival you know in 1991 there's this premier magazine story about how the christ there was a crisis at the festival and that there

was financial mismanagement and low morale and redford had sort of like taken a step back because we think of the the festival as emerging really in the late 80s but the sundance institute had been around since 1981 this is a long term i mean we, we're into the fifth decade of Sundance at this point, which is pretty remarkable, actually. And in 1991 and 92, a handful of titles emerged that become not just celebrated works of art, but financially viable movies that Hollywood is wrapping its arms around and finding a way to reinterpret, remake, resell to the public at large. And I'll just say, like, one of the things that jumps out to me before we start talking about some of these movies is it wasn't just Tarantino who was branded this year. It was that whole class of filmmakers,

you know, and I'm not talking about the new queer cinema filmmakers or the black filmmakers who had films there. It was primarily white filmmakers, mostly men, but not entirely. Some of whom were friends or became friends. You know, Alison Anders, and you mentioned Alexander Rockwell, and Neil Jimenez and Michael Steinberg, and Tarantino.

They all ended up working together in various forms, making movies together. And they were making, I think, not the Little Miss Sunshine version of Sundance movies, but something that seemed to be a slightly more impish Jim Jarmusch kind of vision of movies that I think has also just completely dissipated out of the culture. Like, I don't see any movies now, like Gas Food Lodging or In the Soup. Like, I don't even know what to compare those movies to. I mean, you teach film.

Like, how would you situate movies like this to students? I mean, I think that you'd situate them by saying that the, someone would yell at me on Twitter for saying this, you know, things like Mumblecore are not the same. Please, no one have me say

Bajowski is equivalent to Dermot or anything like that. They're the same in the sense that they feel like something unified. They feel like something that's defined by a kind of smallness and a kind of difference and then little communities form around that i mean weirdly and this is now tied i think more to what sundance actually shows sort of that same like fraternity or community of elevated horror now you know like i don't think that that's a sundance creation though i would trace some of that nomenclature

to something like hereditary which which was a Sundance movie. It was. But, you know, but yeah, I mean, you mentioned in the notes we had for the episode, I mean, Four Rooms is sort of an example of the Sundance kids coming home to roost a little bit. But the festival's effect is also then felt through that generation of late 90s and early 2000s American filmmakers who, whether or not they're Sundance literally because of the Tarantino effect that's where their careers come from you know me I don't know much about Paul Thomas Anderson uh you know and you talked about licorice pizza with a bunch of other people but the whole thing I was waiting for you to bring this but the whole thing with cigarettes and coffee is that's developed at Sundance too. And his whole career is like a Petri dish version of Tarantino, the same way that New Line wanted Boogie Nights to be their Pulp Fiction.

And that's where you see some of that other impact. I would never consider Paul Thomas Anderson a Sundance filmmaker. He started there and then he belonged to all these other festivals. It's Berlin and Cannes, really toronto that made his bones but the sundance effect on a filmmaker like him or the sundance effect on a filmmaker like uh like a sofia coppola even if the films aren't really there the context of hot shot new american indie filmmaking that tarantino cultivated has a big impact on how those filmmakers kind of get packaged and move up through the ranks. Though if any of those filmmakers were now to be at Sundance, I feel like some people would see that as a weird downgrading.

They would sort of be like, well, why aren't they at Cannes or New York Film Festival? Because when it comes to the absolute best of international arts cinema, Sundance has gotten there probably dozens of times, but it's more fluky as opposed to the real programming mandate. I mean, you don't look at the Sundance World Cinema Competition and think it's going to be like the Cannes Competition. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings.

Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. The Alumni from 92 is a mixed bag, I would say. And it's interesting to think about how many of the filmmakers who, you know, debuted here or had big noisy films here are still active and still commanding the culture. You know, one thing I don't really... I recall seeing this a couple of times.

I guess Steven Soderbergh's kafka premiered at sundance um which is a film that has gone by the wayside in a big way and is actually due for a big restoration this year i think also by the criterion channel yeah um but you know that's not it's that's a film that is not really cited much but instead what you have is a handful of filmmakers who i guess are still kind of making work that is in the culture mir and i year i suppose who had mississippi masala there that year you know you've got um of course you've got joe berlinger and bruce zanofsky's uh brothers keeper and joe berlinger is kind of the overlord of true crime documentary and making a lot of stuff for netflix now um though maybe not as good as

some of the stuff he made in the 90s and 2000s um and gosh i mean aside from tarantino i mean jim jarmusch had night on earth there yeah but jarmusch was a known commodity at that point he's there like paul schrader's there with films that are you know these are just these are filmmakers who've been discovered already and i I quite like Night on Earth and I quite like Light Sleeper, but I don't think those movies are beneficiaries of the Sundance effect. They're just a byproduct of it being a good, cool festival. And if it fits in people's schedules or if they're not going to get into the Cannes competition or their distributor wants to put them out earlier in the year, like, sure, put them at Sundance.

But I mean, like, you know, Sundance is not putting light on Paul Schrader in 1992. He's Paul Schrader. Although I guess you could make the case that he's in a bit of a lull at that point in terms of how he's received or celebrated by the culture. But I guess Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who has a new movie coming out in February? No, is it Amelie 2? It's not Amelie 2. I think it's called Big Bug, and it's going to be on Netflix.

Netflix has a, is bankrolling the latest Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. Anyway, I mean, he had delicate test in that year, which was, which was a noisy movie in its own right, but an international film,

not an American film. Sure. And that, and which felt like a Vanguard of something right. For people who aren't familiar with, with delicate test. And it's kind of like a post-apocalyptic movie but the genre elements are really like out of the usual configuration it's sort of like a study of an apartment and a study of a community like it's it's like mad max if it didn't go

outside i guess i don't know if that's the way to to describe it i mean it gets violent and cannibalistic too but it's whimsical. Yeah, Dash of Tim Burton, Dash of Terry Gilliam, you know, there's some genre elements, some oddity, maybe a little Roald Dahl going on in there in the storytelling. But I guess it seems like In the Soup, Gas Food

Lodging, you mentioned Greg Araki's Living End, Derek Jarman's Edward II, which I guess is sort of the standard bearer of the new queer cinema and kind of the leading film in that movement around when this conversation starts. And then The Water Dance and Zebra Head

are the ones that all kind of jump out to me as the dramatic films that garnered a reputation, some of whom have withstood the test of time, others that have sort of trickled off into the ether of independent cinema. And that's a tricky thing with indie movies

when they are proudly indie. They don't always necessarily get to have a widely understood legacy the same way that Hollywood movies do because there's no apparatus to support their history. Well, no, and it's interesting who ends up winning and who ends up winning and who ends up losing or who ends up being diminished. For instance, you mentioned Gas Food Lodging,

which is a wonderful movie by Alison Anders, who made another even more wonderful movie called Grace of My Heart with Ileana Douglas, which is one of the great performances of the mid-90s to not get an Oscar nomination. But I mean, Anders, for various reasons, I don't know much about her personally, her her career kind of waned and it's often used as a kind of a case study and how a lot of the room that male independent filmmakers that period would have to fail and sometimes fail spectacularly like fail on aesthetic levels and artistic levels and just straight up suck you know to come back and make something else and that that opportunity was not afforded to her and i'm also i

mentioned to you in the email a big fan and not just ironically of poison ivy by a female filmmaker cat shea which is the sleaziest kind of you know early 90s exploitation it's really the kind of car crash drew barrymore performance as her life was kind of hitting the skids a little bit she plays this temptress but you say you haven't watched poison ivy i haven't seen it recently not only is it not a bad movie it's made with a sense of kind of like you know grittiness and and feeling that comes out of the other stuff that cat shea had done i mean cat shea had made a a movie i don't know if anyone has seen the film streets which has christinelegate, which is about a drug addicted prostitute in Los Angeles,

which has a really kind of like safty-ish driving kind of energy to it. I mean, I think Kat Shea was a real filmmaker and she's talked about the fact that, you know, her career kind of fell apart as well. And something like Poison Ivy was a bit of a, a bit of a punchline at Sundance, even though really it fit with the festival's mandate in some ways. It's actually independent, has a kind of strong directorial personality. So I guess what I'm saying is that of all the Sundance kids,

the same basic things that happened in Hollywood happen in independent films too, which is female filmmakers are either immediately marginalized out of the box or they make a first successful movie, and then they're kind of not allowed to failure to fail and kind of middling uh middling male writer directors hang around forever never and never get rid of them that remains true i would say in the last three to four years that it feels like the first time really in the history of filmmaking that that is starting to change in a somewhat meaningful way the allison andrews example is is is a bit baffling because gas food lodging was her second film her third film was

mi vida loca which is also a terrific movie grace then then comes the four room segment and grace of my heart and then she makes a fairly small movie called sugar town and another movie called things behind the sun in 2001 and then she doesn't direct a feature film for 11 years she makes a couple of tv movies in the interim but how something like that could have happened i guess in that time she's you know directing some episodes of sex in the city and she's really working primarily as a tv director and has directed quite a bit of prestige television in the last 20 or so years and has had a has had a real good career an admirable career but she's not having quentin tarantino's career um and she's i mean she's not even really i would think i would

say thought of in the way that you know the way that you could wax poetic about what derek jarman did for for filmmaking or even even what uh what what what paul schrader represents in the 90s i think it to filmmaking you know the those movies in the 90s that she made, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's because they don't have a noisy Criterion collection box set behind them. Maybe it's about some of the stories that she's centering

that just don't seem interesting to people. But she's a particularly fascinating one. Well, I mean, for a story with a happier ending, but where the middle of the story is the same. Two years later, it's a Nancy Kelly Reichardt made River of Grass. It took her almost 10 years before she was able sense of sort of realism to them in the fact that it's not just female directors, but very much telling women's stories. I mean, again, in that Criterion doc about the festival, it's really kind of interesting to see the panels that are sort of being convened.

And you get a sense from all the panelists, whether they look kind of happy to be there or sarcastic to be there they know what they're pushing against and they know that it's in the room with them it's not just often los angeles far from park city they know what kind of preferences and what kind of commercial and industrial leverage they're pushing against or they're sort of trying to to grab and that's one of the unstated, not unstated. It's one of the interesting subtext with the John Pearson book and Spike Mike Slackers.

And it leads with Spike Lee's name, but you know, for the most part, the protagonist of that movie is Kevin Smith and the idea of an American independent cinema made in the Tarantino Kevin Smith image, which is basically white and nerdy. Right. in the Tarantino Kevin Smith image, which is basically white and nerdy, right? I'm glad you brought that up

because the other thing that Sundance has done well, essentially across its entire existence and continues to do well, honestly, the best stuff I've seen this week at Sundance is documentary. And the documentaries from this year in 1992 are deeply admirable. Some of them are great

and they have much clearer missions and it's much easier for them, I think, to clarify their politics. This is the year of a brief history of time, the Stephen Hawking film by Errol Morris, probably my favorite documentarian of all time. He's a consistent participant in Sundance over the years. I mentioned Berlinger and Sanofsky and Brothers Keeper, a movie that was on Netflix for many, many years. I don't think it is anymore. If you haven't had a chance to see this movie, it is a confounding, very different sort of

true crime story. Michael Aptet's incident at Al-Ghulala was this year. And a movie that I'd never seen before that I just watched last night on the Criterion channel was Color Adjustment, which is Marlon Riggs's

kind of cultural history of Black identity on television, which is a really, really movie um that i feel like if it were made today would be as it would be a huge deal yeah it would be it would be a visionary work of cultural criticism and now it's only now basically basically has only meaningful distribution today 30 years later which is pretty wild and there are a number of other examples very it's a very funny movie the the riggs one i mean like just the the analysis and juxtapositions that he makes it maybe not laugh a lot funny but they're very

wry they're very smart yeah it's very clever i mean it's one of those movies that i think also was kind of transgressive in that it has you know, deeply thoughtful participants in Hollywood and sociologists observing the problematic nature of something like Amos and Andy, but also saying like, there's great performance here. And so how do we tangle with that? How do we tangle with the idea of a bad thing, having elements that are worth, worth celebrating? You know, it's's not it isn't just like this hectoring down the middle like here's why this was bad until it got good kind of analysis that i think we find all the time there's there's a complexity in the filmmaking and the ideas that he's trying to sell and again i think that's something you see in sundance and in docs over

the years all the time and i don't i don't know what to say about that other than it's a safe space for a slightly more transgressive style of documentary filmmaking than I think what you find when you turn on Netflix every day. We're in a prototype era of docs, and Sundance is still kind of pushing beyond something. be on something well you mentioned berlinger and i mean he's not as influential as moore but yeah i mean pretty much any true crime that gets made for streamers now to some extent is is living off of not just brothers keeper but you know the west memphis movies and whatever else and in some ways i feel that's a cross that he should bear because the explosion of the true crime industry from some angles is quite lurid and gross and then from other angles you know people just you know just just you know just love that stuff but i mean brother's keeper which yet it's been a hard i mean not a super easy movie to find before now and if anyone has a chance to watch it on criterion channel they should

it's a movie made with such a lack of judgment and some so little hand-holding i mean even in terms of refusing to clarify what the filmmaker necessarily really thinks. And some of that is the reticence of these characters who sort of exist on the margins and outside of societal norms and in this very kind of dilapidated, old, weird, American kind of backdrop. And yeah, I mean, that's probably the version of Sundance

that people who love and respect the festival love and respect their memories of as a launching pad for filmmakers like that and I think the role in Sundance popularizing documentaries and putting documentary filmmakers front and center shouldn't be understated that is a big part of what they've done they say so in the doc where one of the programmers is like we always saw the world dramatic and doc competitions as sort of equal, right? So, you know, as a measuring stick and launching pad for American nonfiction cinema, it was and I think remains kind of a big deal. I covered Sundance for Ringer last year, and I was much more impressed with the documentaries by and large than the feature narratives. Yeah, I am a bit of a documentary wonk, so I'm perhaps not the most impartial judge on that. But I'm just consistently more interested in the documentaries that I just watched The Exiles, for example, the film about Christina Choi and a film that she tried to make in the 1980s. And it's just incredibly rich and deeply manageable at 89 minutes. You know, that's the sort of thing that is happening at the festival routinely.

So as you go down the list of films that we saw in 1992, can you recommend one that people should try to track down? Is there something that you think, aside from Poison Ivy, that you think is meaningful? You should watch Poison Ivy. It's a great motion picture. I mean, I really, just in general, I love Gregor Ackie. And I love The Living End. I hadn't seen it in a while. And then when watching that doc, there's the one shot where the two characters are having breakfast.

And it's this perfect bit of composition where there's a cereal box with its side turned out. Not a cereal box, but it's like it's a Barbie box. Then on the wall, there's a Smiths poster. And you're sort of like, you you know this idea of pop cultural decor that iraqi does so well in so many of his movies but again it's a road movie it's not just a romance like my own private idaho was previously but more of a kind of hellacious you know rabble-rousing kind of romance with two hiv positive characters which it never once apologizes for or seeks to to contextualize i mean iraqi was a real libertine he was and and remains so and i think it's a shame that in some ways aside from mysterious

skin which was his big breakthrough he never really had that brass ring available to him he's had a very honorable career but you know i think he's a fun kind of hellraiser and the other movie that's from the new queer cinema that year that i really like which we haven't mentioned is uh is swoon right which is uh which is you know really really interesting you know gloss on leopold and lobe and i think at the time i forget if it was a programmer or if it was the the director where he sort of was like you know you see movies about heterosexual couples who commit murder and no one pathologizes murder as a heterosexual you know pastime so I think to take Leopold and Loeb

and not rescue it from like Rope and Hitchcock but just present it in a way that has a different kind of ownership of it and a different aesthetic gloss on it and very much a companion piece to Todd Haynes' Poison. I like both of those movies a lot. I think they're both, in their way, a real kind of kick. As far as Gregor Aki goes, also one of my favorite directors and someone who has

made quite a few films but has not made a film in a long time. He did make a TV series for Starz called Now Apocalypse in 2019. Did you ever watch the show? No, I should have. It's pretty fun. It has a lot in common with Kaboom, the 2010 movie that he made. It feels almost like an update of Kaboom, which is also a kind of like

very mischievous movie. And Kaboom is great. Really fun. Kaboom is like... All of his stuff is great. So sorry, go on. But I just, I think he's the kind of person who also not unlike allison anders has kind of shuffled off to television and found a very productive and probably lucrative career making tv he had his own show in 2019 but he's directed

episodes of riverdale and 13 reasons why and you know red oaks i mean this is what a lot of the filmmakers who are operating in this era, if they're still active, are up to these days. What else? Anything else you want to shout out from that? Zebrahead? Are you a Zebrahead fan?

I have never seen Zebrahead, Sean. Oh, interesting. I've never seen Zebrahead. Can you convince me on Zebrahead? Well, I don't know. I'm trying to figure out if I want to. Zebrahead, it's a movie about an interracial romance between a white guy and a black girl.

And the white guy is played memorably by Michael Rapaport. I'm sold. Sold. He obviously has a slightly different identity in our culture now than he did in 1992. Although it was all there, honestly. It was all there going back to 1992. And in Boucher Wright, who is a terrific actor, 1992. Although it was all there, honestly, it was all there going back to 1992. Um, and in

Bushay Wright, who, um, you know, is a terrific, uh, actor plays the love interest in that film. And people may remember her from like dead presidents or from blade, but, um, it's interesting because Anthony Drazen made this movie and he did not make very many movies after this. And I, he does not have the long career as far as i can tell of of tv work in the 2000s one of the only movies he made was an adaptation of hurley burley with sean penn which is like kind of a mess yeah i've seen that uh this movie is it is aspiring to something that our culture has moved past is what i'll say about zebra head but i think like you know white kids from new york who wanted to be inside of hip-hop culture was something that I understood pretty clearly when I was 13 years old when I saw Zebrahead.

And that's the other thing about Tarantino that I'll just say very quickly before we move on from Reservoir Dogs fully. The other thing is, if you were getting into rap at this time, the idea of Tarantino as this recombinant kind of cultural DJ was very resonant for someone like me. Picking and choosing the things that you liked. And you talked about you and your friends making skits for an album. That's essentially what De La Soul were doing. De La Soul were just grabbing bits and pieces of their favorite stuff and smashing it together. I was trying to have fun. I always figured I was exactly the same as De La Soul.

You know, that was always How I care about myself. I'm looking at the synopsis for T-Rid, and I see it's one of the first films shot by a really brilliant cinematographer by Maurice Alberti, who worked with Todd Haynes a lot and ended up shooting The Wrestler. He's a terrific DP. So, that's exciting.

It's worth checking out. Is Zebra Head available in that Criterion Channel collection? I don't believe so. I'm not sure. So just very quickly, the festival winners. We mentioned In the Soup,

which is a, you know, kind of an iterative movie about a guy who wants to make movies, you know, it's like Fellini's stepson trying to remake

Eight and a Half. Yeah, and again, it represents a meeting of, of indie cinema axioms. Cause you have Steve Buscemi sharing the screen with Seymour Cassell, right? So Seymour Cassell was the proto Steve Buscemi or Buscemi is Seymour

Cassell 2.0, you know, in a way, I mean, God knows what Tarantino would have looked like in 1967, but Seymour Cassell probably would have been there. And Buscemi could have definitely carried husbands.

I mean, Buscemi is sort of the... He's the mascot or not the mascot. He's the face in some ways of a lot of that new American cinema stuff. And I don't want to be wrong. Did Tree's Lounge play at Sundance in 96? I believe that it did. I believe it did. But even if it didn't,

it feels like the platonic... It spiritually did't it feels like the platonic yeah it feels like the platonic ideal of a of a sundance movie that this movie that buscemi made uh you know about unemployed alcoholics it had that sundance vibe which that also became its own marketing language and programming language and theaters play movies that are festival movies in toronto so we had a whole chain of cinemas here called the festival cinemas they would show either what was it tiff or what was it sundance so it's a way of either selecting an audience or driving audience towards a kind of movie and that's definitely how i remember seeing or hearing about in the soup

as that kind of a thing i think what in the soup speaks most to is the fact that barton fink came out the year earlier you know and then vishmi also is involved in Living in Oblivion, the Tom DeCillo movie, which is also about navel-gazing white filmmakers. So that's another Cohen effect or Tarantino effect is these people like, oh my god, the creative process is so hard. Him emerging as the mascot of all of these filmmakers was always fascinating. But another example of a guy whose career, he had done bit parts. He was Test Tube in King of New of these filmmakers. It was always fascinating. But another example of a guy whose career, you know, he had done bit parts.

He was test tube and King of New York, you know, in 1990, he had small parts in New York movies, but Hollywood got interested in him. They got interested in him in the care as the character actor du jour for about 10 years there. And those were good times.

He's he's anytime he crops up in a movie. I'm never disappointed. No, none of this should be confused with anything, but the highest esteem for Steve Buscemi, who is like flat out one of the great American actors of that period, you know?

But it's very suggestive that he's in the officially ratified Sundance movie that you're in the soup, which he carries, you know? If it won the grand prize, it's because of him. And then, you know, a little more casually into the side he's in, he's in reservoir dogs,

you know, it's an interesting thing. A number of other films won awards that year. Brief history of time. We mentioned the water dance, which is a movie we haven't talked about very much brothers keeper, you know, a zebra head did win the directing award for Anthony Drazen,

a movie that did not win an award that year is reservoir dogs. And yet here we are with 30 minutes on Reservoir Dogs at the top of this competition. I'm sure Quentin makes that trade a hundred. I'm sure Quentin makes that trade a hundred. I don't know. What I know about Quentin is he likes to win. So I think not winning

probably rankles even to this day. Fair enough. I gotta say, I don't think I realized this until I was reading about the movie again last night to prepare for this conversation. But you know, that famous scene where the ear is sliced off and where the famous four-way shootout takes or showdown takes off at the end of the movie that,

that it looks like a disused factory of some kind. That is five minutes from my house it is a formal funeral parlor and embalming zone that is five minutes away from where i live and that feels it feels right it feels like the movie that sprung me into this world that got me understanding what sundance and the movie industry frankly frankly, is right around the corner. Well, that scene, I mean, it's interesting when you mentioned a lot of the negative criticism and sort of controversy around that scene. I'll say something else about Reservoir Dogs, as well-written and cast as it is. In your mind's eye, take that scene out of the movie. What's the movie? I mean, it's not nothing because everything about it is still good, but the way that it stops dead to basically put forth, it's an aesthetic statement that it's making.

It's saying we are stopping everything to show you something that is now being framed and presented in such a way that is going to either make you uncomfortable or you are past discomfort, in which case you're cool. It's so presentational. It takes place beneath a proscenium. Madsen is not just performing for the victim. He's performing for us.

It's the essence of gratuitousness. And it's the movie. And yet. And yet. One. We do not see the ear being removed. No we don't. Just as we do not see the heist in

the movie and that's the thing is that ultimately tarantino who is known as this vulgar provocateur loves to withhold and that's another thing that i really like about the movie as much controversy as there was you know draped around this movie my final memory of it is in 1999 in my ap English class, in the closing weeks of the year after the test had already been administered when there was nothing left to do but sit in class and chat about books, we had show and tell

and every member of the class brought in one piece of culture that said something about them. And I chose to show this scene in the AP English class. People were not happy i was not celebrated for my taste except for maybe a handful of people who were close to me at the time and yet my teacher essentially had to shout down the students by saying it's the telling and not the

showing that is happening in quentin tarantino movies. And that's why it was a good choice for that sequence. And so, even looking back on it, was it really that gratuitous, that sequence? Or did it tell us something, show us something about Mr. Blonde that we otherwise wouldn't have believed because we never saw the heist in the first place? Well, and it tells us something

about Tarantino that every subsequent movie would double down on, which is that he knows how to use pop culture. It's like, it's the Ludvico technique from Clockwork Orange and it is just Clockwork Orange. It's a Steeler's wheel instead of singing in the rain, but it's the idea that he's going to take things that are kind of,

he's going to use easy listening to cut off someone's ear, right? It's wielding, you know, wielding pop culture in a very kind of funny and punitive kind of way. I mean, I love that scene, too, and it's indivisible from my memories of the movie. But I feel like if you take it out, there's no point where the movie is taking a bow. And I think of Tarantino as a filmmaker who likes to take bows in the middle of what he's doing.

I don't know if I could make a list of the least self-effacing American filmmakers of all time. He's, he's very, very, very close to the top, you know? And I,

and I think that, uh, that's part of the legacy for good and for, and, and, and for ill of, of, of,

uh, of reservoir dogs. I'll say this in Toronto, a few years ago, a filmmaker friend of mine, Chandler Levack staged a reading of reservoir Dogs, which was all female, you know, and what was really interesting was beyond all the surface kind of jokes and undermining of all that. I remember we all went and watched it at U of T in the theater there. It was done on stage, but they

did it in the theater at U of T, and what everyone said as a compliment to the movie, they were like, wow, the movie still works, because actually having the parts read in a stage play kind of area was still pretty compelling as drama so if you hear me you know taking little shots of tarantino here and there it's not because the movies are bad and reservoir dogs is i think one of his better ones so yeah adam it's time for you to take a bow time for you to take a bow. Time for you to take a bow, man. Yeah, right. What's the best thing you've seen at Sundance, Sean? I don't know. Perhaps you should stay tuned to the big picture later this week. I will.

Because I'm going to talk to, I think, Amy Nicholson about all the things that we've been watching at the festival. I did mention to you right before we started that I just saw one of the nastiest pieces of horror that I've seen in a little while. It's a film called Speak No Evil, which will, I believe, be on Shudder later this year. And that's a Danish film. And it's willing to show what Reservoir Dogs often is not willing to show. But Adam, listen, thank you for doing

the show. You can read Adam on The Ringer and frankly, all over the place. One of the great film critics working today. And you'll be back soon. So looking forward to that. Thank you to Steve Allman for his work on this episode. And of course, thank you to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for putting it all together. Stay tuned to The Big Picture.

Like I said, we'll be talking about Sundance and maybe a little bit of awards situations as well. We'll see you then. Thank you.